“We probably should be marching in the street [for better pay], but, well, that’s really not our style.” BRONX LIBRARIAN
WHO is stealing the great librarians of New York?
That’s a question increasingly asked as the city’s public-library systems continue to be hurt by defections in the stacks.
The brain drain from our public libraries has gotten so bad that the New York Public Library lost 25 percent of its librarians last year. Thirty librarians resigned in just one month this year, three from a very popular Bronx branch where librarians once fought just to get on the waiting list.
Meanwhile, Brooklyn and Queens have also been wracked with departures, losing roughly 17 percent of their bookies last year.
“Most who leave don’t want to leave, but have no other choice,” said one Bronx librarian who requested anonymity. “Our salaries just can’t compete. We probably should be marching in the street [for better pay], but, well, that’s really not our style.”
Of course, the very same brain drain is occurring among other high-skilled, yet underpaid city employees. Suburban towns are always luring our police officers and school principals with the promise of higher salaries and better pension plans – which they can provide because they allow New York City to spend millions training the future suburban work force.
In the case of the librarians, some are lost to private companies that are gearing up for the so-called information age. But most librarians are actually bolting for jobs at public schools in the city, which, believe it or not, offer better salaries and those great vacations.
“I’m making 10 percent more now,” said Brendalyn Pasha, 28, who just left the West Farms branch in The Bronx for a junior high school down the road. She now makes $35,000 a year and will see her salary top out somewhere around $70,000 – roughly $25,000 more than she would make if she stayed in the public-library system her entire career.
There are dozens of young librarians like Brendalyn Pasha, committed young women and men who start as trainees at $27,000 a year and who work on their master’s degrees at night – thanks to grants from the library system. When they graduate in two years, they come out with an earning potential that far exceeds what the library can pay them.
You’ll find that in the card catalog under Cycle, Vicious.
Last year, library officials asked the city for a one-time, 15 percent raise for its librarians – which would still keep our bookmasters far behind librarians in other urban systems. (In San Francisco, starting librarians earn $43,000, $12,000 more than ours do after serving as trainees.)
“The raise would’ve only put us in the middle, not even taking into account our high cost of living here,” said one library official who requested anonymity because he has to sit down at the budget table with the same mayor next year.
The city, with a huge surplus, rejected the $9 million budget request. If the librarians got raises, the argument went, then every other union would demand a raise.
But a disgruntled, underpaid work force has its own cost. Experienced librarians are being replaced by underqualified staffers – and service is suffering.
“We’re running the libraries with trainees,” said one librarian. “They don’t provide the extra service a full librarian provides. And when they graduate from library school, they’ll be gone, too.”
The unions representing city librarians are already trying to sway public opinion before their contract expires next March 31. Mostly, that’s consisted of informational picketing and informal conversations with library users.
But if the city doesn’t come through with some kind of raise, that informational picketing could turn to the real kind.
Better brush up on your Dewey Decimal System.